Important Notice

"In Kumar you will behold an art that makes direct contact with your inner self. As you watch for the first time, just feel the impact, do not analyze or breakup the splashes of color or the strokes from the palette. Let the pictures stamp their own truth upon your soul.” (Uma Prakash, “Ram Kumar- Beyond the Abstract,” Ram Kumar: Selected Works 1950 - 2010, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2010, p. 19)

Ram Kumar’s pictures are... "In Kumar you will behold an art that makes direct contact with your inner self. As you watch for the first time, just feel the impact, do not analyze or breakup the splashes of color or the strokes from the palette. Let the pictures stamp their own truth upon your soul.” (Uma Prakash, “Ram Kumar- Beyond the Abstract,” Ram Kumar: Selected Works 1950 - 2010, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2010, p. 19)

Ram Kumar’s pictures are adhered to a deeply personal experience of travelling. He’d often wander alone, live amongst people, to places in search of new stories and adventures. Kumar is known to have written several travelogues and short stories that he shared with his friends. A trip to Benaras, in 1960, with M F Husain is popularly quoted as a pertinent event that changed both artists’ perception towards art. His process is also rather intriguing, painting from the mind with buried introspection and surprising impulse which was quite unlike other artists that planned what they were going to paint.

The present lot, painted in 2014, belongs to a time when his style was mature and yet his explorations with colour didn’t cease, rather grew more dynamic. Patches of cadmium yellow applied in layers, mixing with hues of blue and green, the present lot recalls eloquent words by Ranjit Hoskote- “The true subject of Ram Kumar’s art, perhaps, is the landscape as Beloved. In responding to the palpable eroticism of graze and blur, the stippling and studding of textures across these painted surfaces, we share his manifest rapture, his sense of stepping outside himself to attain communion with the Beloved.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Parts of a World: Reflections on the Art of Ram Kumar, 2002)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site